Whats with the petty Open Source Pureness that has killed PWCX

[Jim Cornette]

seth vidal wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 21:22 -0400, Listman wrote:
> 
>>We are all being shafted in this one. For those of you like me that have
>>experienced high quality video courtesy of PWCX.....
>>
>>http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/
>>
>>Is their any way to talk some sense into the Kernel maintainers?
>>
> 
> 
> You might want to read Greg K-H's faq before you go 'talking sense' into
> anyone.
> 
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/99639/
> 
> 
> 
>>What is next, don't allow nvidia driver to load?
>>
> 
> 
> This would make an enormous number of fedora devel people happy. :)
> -sv
> 
> 
> 

Thanks for the link to the articles. I especially enjoyed the comment 
regarding legality and morality.

And I thought that most of these lists were pretty tame and dry.

On the inclusion of hooks and binary only drivers. It is understandable 
that the source code is freely available, hooks can be added. A user 
space alternative can be come up with to overcome the removal of the 
hook from the kernel.

On the hardware support for as many devices that are possible, 
especially issues related to getting highly functional and useful 
devices running optimally, it would be decent to have.

Of course, I'm carrying a binary driver around recently myself 
(i810_dvr.o) until the development build catches up with my hardware 
used. I know the patch and rebuilding the package from source would be 
ideal. I find that it is easier than installing xorg-x11 to test to see 
if it works, finding out that it doesn't work, then reinstalling all of 
the older rpms or recompiling xorg-x11 from source with each new release.

Basically, I see the benifits from an all open source system and would 
ideally shoot for this sysem. I also understand that sometimes being too 
pure with the source vs. binary issues can be time consuming and a 
challenge on those that are just shooting for a great running and 
hardware richly supported system that doesn't rip you off by closing the 
code to the world.

Nvidia and the PWCX can move to open source and reduce their overhead 
and allow others to improve the software that makes their hardware 
function correctly. I'm sure that the respect for the industries would 
be recognized and they would have input from others on how to optimize 
their hardware functionality even more.

my morality vs. legality view,

Jim


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